The Hearts and Lives of Men by Fay Weldon Page B

was over that he regretted it. Men do seem to regret these things even more easily than do women.
    “Where is Helen?” he asked, as soon as he was able.
    “She’s in the de Waldo Clinic,” said Angie, “having an abortion. The operation is booked for ten this morning.”
    It was by that time 8:45. Clifford dressed, in haste.
    “But why didn’t she tell me?” he asked. “The little fool!”
    “Clifford,” said Angie, languorously from the bed, “I can only suppose because it isn’t your baby.”
    That slowed him down. Angie knew well enough that if you have just deceived your one true love, as Clifford had just done, you are all the more ready to believe you are yourself deceived.
    “You’re so trusting, Clifford,” added Angie, to Clifford’s back, and it was a pity for her that she did, for Clifford caught a glimpse of Angie in the big wall-mirror, gold-mounted and mercury-based, three hundred years old, in which a thousand women must have stared, and it somehow cast back a strange reflection of Angie. As if indeed she was the wickedest woman who had ever looked into it. Angie’s eyes glinted with what Clifford suddenly perceived was malice, and he realized, too late to save his honor, but at least in time to save Nell, what Angie was up to. He finished tying his tie.
    Clifford said not another word to Angie; he left her lying on the fur rug on the bed, where she had no right to be—it was after all Helen’s place—and was at the de Waldo Clinic by 9:15 and it was fortunate there was at least some time to spare, for the reception staff was obstructive and the operation had been brought forward by half an hour. Dr. Runcorn, I have a terrible feeling, could not wait to get his hands on Helen’s baby and destroy it from within. Abortion is sometimes necessary, sometimes not, always sad. It is to the woman as war is to the man—a living sacrifice in a cause justified or not justified, as the observer may decide. It is the making of hard decisions—that this one must die that that one can live in honor and decency and comfort. Women have no leaders, of course; a woman’s conscience must be her General. There are no stirring songs to make the task of killing easier, no victory marches and medals handed around afterwards, merely a sense of loss. And just as in war there are ghouls, vampires, profiteers and grave-robbers as well as brave and noble men, so there are wicked men, as well as good, in abortion clinics and Dr. Runcorn was an evil man.
    Clifford pushed aside a Jamaican nurse and two Scottish orderlies—all three fed up with wages in the public sector and so gone into private health care, or so they told their friends—and since no one would tell him where Helen was, he stalked along the shiny, pale corridors of the Clinic, throwing open doors as he went, doing without help. Startled, unhappy women, sitting up neatly in bed in frilly or fluffy bedjackets, looked up at him in sudden hope, as if perhaps there at last was their savior, their knight in shining armor, he who was to come if all was to be explained, made happy and well. But of course it was not so: he was Helen’s, not theirs.
    Clifford found Helen on a trolley in the theater annex, white-gowned, head turbaned; a nurse bent over her; Helen was unconscious, ready to go into the theater. Clifford tussled with the nurse for possession of the trolley.
    “This woman is to go back to the ward at once,” he said, “or by God I’ll have the police in!” And he pinched her fingers nastily in the trolley’s steering mechanism. The nurse yelled. Helen did not stir. Dr. Runcorn emerged to see what the matter was.
    “Caught red-handed!” said Clifford, bitterly, and indeed Dr. Runcorn was. He had just disposed of twins, rather late on in a pregnancy, and a very messy matter it had been. But Dr. Runcorn prided himself on his record for twins—not out of his clinic those frequent cases where one twin has been aborted, the other gone on,